Finding a Fit for Life's Funcʃions
“I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.” – Charles Cooley The eloquence of this quote struck me the moment I chanced upon it on Facebook. Quotes, by the necessity of their...
Who Is Ivan Illich? A Croatian-Austrian philosopher. He surfaced in 1926, and departed in 2002. In his time, he writes radical polemics which fundamentally challenged the logic of Western institutions. He was a boldly deviant thinker under-appreciated by both the left and the right in later years. Look him up...
Marx, Durkheim, Weber. They remain our pillows in… I mean pillars to Sociology. Much subsequent work situates themselves within the paradigms of these classical thinkers. Why is it that we remain obsessed with them, even if their most notable assertions have been countered and disproved by modern instruments of scientific...
What is Sociology? This perennially jarring – but valid – question cannot be answered without making sense of the diverse strands of research within the discipline. It is not enough to learn of distinct methodologies without knowing how they stand together. To this end, Arthur Stinchcombe’s (1984) commentary may serve...
Struck by a wave of random joyfulness, I returned home from tuition one day galloping with my front hoofs up. My mother, seeing my excitement, interrupted: “Finish your homework first!” I was momentarily puzzled. I can’t be happy until I finish my homework? Then I realized she misinterpreted my hand gestures....
Psychological disorders, says the charitable. Craziness, says the uncharitable. An ‘alienative coalition’, says the sociologist Erving Goffman. Before you dismiss this as conspiracy talk, let’s look more closely at what he meant. ‘Coalition’ means an alliance of different parties, and ‘alienative’ refers to isolating someone. Goffman argues that a mental...
